4'33" and the liturgy

As an organist I have spent more than twenty years playing voluntaries to rooms full of mostly inattentive people. This is fine so far as it goes; opening and closing voluntaries are not meant to be recital performances, but rather opportunities for transition from the ordinary space and time of day-to-day life, to the sacred space and time of the liturgy, and back again; they often also introduce or comment upon pieces sung within the liturgy. Voluntaries rarely have the chance to perform even these functions, however, as they are commonly disrupted by casual and even cacophonous conversation, and though this is a great frustration to the organist who hopes to do his job artfully, to provide some delight to those who will listen, to reap some satisfaction from both those things, and to receive the respect due any human for her labor and sheer existence, there is more at stake than the disruption of a piece of beautiful music.

In response to a recent and particularly egregious interruption to a voluntary, I made plans to present the most famous and important work of twentieth-century experimental composer John Cage, 4'33". The title refers to the total duration of the three-movement piece, in which the performer(s) are instructed not to play their instrument(s); the work, though commonly thought to consist of silence, actually comprises the ambient sounds listeners hear while it is being performed. It is, like Rauschenberg’s white paintings that immediately inspired it, a canvas that subtly mirrors the fullness of the world around it, and a frame for contemplating such, making subversive use of the conventions of classical concert etiquette in order to do so (and challenging unmindful uses and abuses of that particular cultural construct). 4'33" not only suggests that any sounds, experienced fully enough, may constitute music, but also reflects the impossibility of silence in a living world. It is also an attempt to eliminate the co-optation of sound (and by extension, one gathers, of the rest of the world) to human ends by removing the composer and performer, as self-expressive agents, from control over the content (if not the intent) of the work; as Cage wrote in ‘Experimental Music’, the composer ‘must give up the desire to control sound, clear his mind of music, and set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expression of human sentiments’. 4'33" is a provocative piece, and by playing it I wished not only to follow the composer’s intentions but also (at the risk of violating them as just stated) to provoke some further thought, namely to question whether, if no one is listening, the piece has actually existed at all: the impossibility of music in a distracted world, rather than the impossibility of silence in an attentive one.

But the issues raised by this work concern not only sound and music: in its existence or non-existence, 4'33" has important things to teach us about liturgy as well. If the piece challenges the possibility of the absence of sound – even in an anechoic chamber Cage experienced the sounds of his own body – the liturgy challenges the possibility of the absence of God. But it takes practice and mindful waiting to be able to see and hear the divine, and like 4'33", the liturgy is an exercise in, a frame for, this focused attention: in this specific form, time, place, and yes, by an agreed-upon set of behaviors and sequence of events (cf. the ‘disciplined-action’-within-a-given-framework that constituted much of Cage’s work following 4'33"), we learn to see the divine presence in Word and Sacrament, so that we may then discern it far and wide, and having recognized it, (like the artist or the prophet) point it out and call others to come and see, and one day be able to call all things holy (cf. Zc 14.20–21) even as Cage could call all sound music. Even Cage’s call to embrace the ‘purposelessness’ of music, and to reject self-expression through it, has its analogical corollaries: though the liturgy is provocative and many other things besides, and though any given performance of any part of it will necessarily contain and reflect the world around it (and each participant’s fragment of that world), it is not primarily meant to be used for an end outside itself (for in a sense there is no end outside itself, or even within itself ), and is certainly not to be a ‘vehicle for man-made theories or expression of human sentiments’. If 4'33" is meant to let sounds ‘be themselves’, then the liturgy (by being allowed to ‘be itself ’) is meant to let the Lord be Godself, and to let us truly be ourselves, without any claim upon those selves, upon one another, the world, the Lord... but with profound acceptance of the givenness, and holiness, of it all. Cage: ‘The mind may be used... to control and understand an available experience. Or the mind may give up its desire to improve on creation and function as a faithful receiver of experience.’

Rowan Williams addressed these forfeitures in a talk given at St Gregory’s monastery in Rome several years ago:

without [contemplation], we cannot see one another clearly...[we seek] to enable a clear, even ‘prophetic’ vision of the other – seeing them, as the Eastern Christian tradition represented by Evagrius suggests, in the light of their authentic spiritual essence, not as they relate to our passions or preferences...it would be wrong to suggest that we enter into contemplation in order to see one another more clearly... [but]... with the habit of discernment belongs a habit of recognizing one another as agents of Christ’s grace and compassion and redemption. And such a habit will develop only if we are daily learning the discipline of silence and patience, waiting for the truth to declare itself to us as we slowly set aside the distortions in our vision that are caused by selfishness and greed.

Or as Cage wrote, ‘that mind [which has given up its own desires and attempts to control] is free to enter into the act of listening, hearing each sound just as it is, not as a phenomenon more or less approximating a preconception.’

In the end the gesture I intended was undermined; the title of the work did not get printed in the program, and without this clue to the silence of the organ I chose not to perform the piece. The failure of the plan, however, ironically only further underscores the radical contingency of musical art – and, continuing the analogy, of liturgy: symbolic act, whether artistic, political, or liturgical, has no force without an audience. And thus while the liturgy, the Kingdom, the Spirit’s own being and action may, like music, flow around and through us in an eternal and unbroken (I do not wish to say ‘abstract’ or ‘ideal’, as I do not mean ‘unreal’) stream, into which we dip in particular instances, those who are unwilling or unprepared to partake of it may well die of thirst.